This was certainly another interesting reading year full of ups and downs. Reflecting on everything I read over the course of the year is a bit odd because seeing it all compiled together makes me realize just how much I actually read.

Like last year, I read way more towards the beginning of the year due to the reading challenges I was doing. And, as it got towards the end of the year, I read less and less. That is especially so for this year because of my new work hours, which have left me with very little time and motivation to read. Or, at least, read anything other than fanfiction if I am being quite frank. To sum it all up month-by-month, I have a chart which you can see below.

Luckily for me, I use Book Roast's CAWPILE in order to keep track of my books. While I am really bad at keeping up with updating it, it makes it really easy when it comes to this review because it already has all your stats compiled. As you can see, my highest read is during the months I participated in a group reading challenge. You can also see where I had a tiny bit of a slump right after since I read probably too much.

The real kicker though would be November and December, since that's when I started to have no time to read which is a bit devastating. I did read something though...

Before I delve more into this, I did want to mention that any and all graphics in this are from Book Roast's CAWPILE.

Now, it is time into more detail by looking at some stats.

According to my Goodreads reading challenge, as you can see above, I read a grand total of 260 titles. And I use the term titles here because they were not all novels as I read a good amount of manga this year. Comparing the 2022 reading challenge to 2021, I did read less, like way less. Last year I read 400 titles which...was insane. Looking at this year alone though, I still surpassed my pretty large goal. As I said earlier on though, I did slow down a lot towards the end of the year and didn't end up reading much, so I still feel less accomplished with my amount read.

Based on my CAWPILE total, I did in fact read 260 titles, so it is good to know that that count is accurate. I also ended up DNFing 23 books which is far less than I was expecting.

An almost even split between novels and manga which I am happy about. I will admit though that I do want to read more manga since anything of a graphic medium seems to work slightly better for me compared to novels.

I read, roughly, 61,926 pages and listened to 134 hours worth of audiobooks. In all honesty, that doesn't seem like a lot but I guess it is considering the number of books I read. I am surprised that Agust has more pages read compared to April, but maybe I read some chunky books that month.

It also comes as no surprise to me that the majority of the books I read ended up being a 3-star rating. There were just a lot of 'meh' books this year, unfortunately. And while that may be the majority, I will try and focus on the positive since at least I had a good amount of 4-star reads. Granted though, a lot of those are also probably manga volumes... I also only had four 5-star reads which, well, isn't great now is it? 20% of the books I read as well were 2-star reads so...maybe I just didn't have the best reading year ever?

To no one's surprise, fantasy is my most-read genre, having read 114. That amounts to just under half of all the books I read this year which is a lot. Again though, not surprising seeing as that genre is what I gravitate to the most. What is surprising though is that it wasn't higher than it is. I ended up reading quite a lot of mystery and horror books this year. While not all of them were particularly good, I do find that I rather like those genres and want to read more of it this year.

Something else I discovered this year is that I need to stick to adult books when it comes to fantasy. I have always read YA since it is such a popular age demographic when it comes to fantasy books. However, there are a lot of bad nuts in that genre, a lot. Adult though, I think might be way better for me not only because it fits my age, but also because the plots and maturity level of them don't bother me as YA does.

While this chart doesn't show the number of pages read in increasing order properly, you can still get a lot of information from it. It seems most of the books I read are around 150-200 pages long, which doesn't surprise me considering that I read a lot of manga this year, and most volumes tend to be 192 pages long. I also read a lot of standard-length books, 300-400 pages, but I also read some chunky ones as well. There are a couple of 500+ or even 700+ books sprinkled in there, and I even read one that was over 1000 pages.

A great thing to track is the amount of series I read. While I do read a lot of standalones, I tend to start a lot of series. To be exact, I started 39 series this year and only finished 16. Sure, a lot of series are ongoing and therefore I can't finish them, but I would like to be someone who sees an entire series through if I can.

Something else I like to keep track of is when books were released. I try to read as many new releases as I can within the year they are published, and if I can't then I try to read them in the next year. For this year, I ended up reading 49 books published in 2022. A lot of those reads were able to happen due to ARCs, which I am grateful for. Still, I would have liked to get through more, same goes for 2021 releases. I read 38 of them and I wanted to read more but I ran out of gas and motivation to do so.

READING GOALS

I failed spectacularly at pretty much every goal I had. There were a few reading challenges I participated in, none of which I ended up keeping track of. I also didn't complete my '22 book to read in 2022.' Of the 22 books, I ended up reading 9...9 whole books. I did mean to get to all of them at the end of the year but, well, I suddenly no longer had the time to do so. My other main reading goal is to read releases from 2022, as well as from the previous year. I did already mention this in a previous section, and I did do a decent job but wished I read more.